HIS 2303F-001: Selected Topics: The Crucible of the Modern World [US]

 

This course will be designed to probe the extent and limits of United States hegemony over the world order which emerged from the Second Great War. It will be conceptualized around the notion of the United States as the last great Empire. And it will emphasize the fundamental significance of historical sensibility in understanding the present triumphalism and vulnerability of the Americans.

It was of course, and to say the least, not always so. This is but one reason for an opening focus on the Great Depression, which destroyed so much and so many. Cheap lives, hard eyes, and chastened hopes nearly foreclosed opportunity altogether, along with grand designs and reveries of Imperial dominance. The Second World War changed all this but never obliterated the memory of the Thirties. Thus, the policy planners who envisioned the post-war world looked regularly and anxiously over their shoulders while trying simultaneously to anticipate and control the future. The furious American assault on the British Empire occurs in this context. So did, at least in part, the fashioning of the World Bank and the I.M.F., along with other institutional arrangements designed ostensibly to promote reconstruction after the war. I would also plan to devote some time to the current and ever-renewing controversy over the dropping of the Atomic bomb. This event, as some might argue, inaugurated the Cold War, whose scars and emblems are very much with us still.

Within the context of these topics, I would also plan to probe a series of issues relating to continental and international social, political, and economic development. The line from GATT to the WTO to the broad range of issues presented by globalization needs to be traced historically. And, in particular, the impact of these remarkable developments on the lives of ordinary men and women needs to be addressed. It is also my conviction that students should have the chance to assess, even in some limited ways, the nature of the United States’s contemporary political economy. This will, of course, necessitate some attention to domestic arrangements in America. Nor will we overlook the grand contemporary issue of terrorism.

Finally, I suspect that it will be necessary to preserve among us, and at all times, a tolerant spirit, given the deeply contentious issues that we shall encounter.

Required Texts

 

I plan to use a shorter, essay-ish “text” on the modern period, Norman L. and Emily S. Rosenberg, In Our Times: American Since World War II, 7th edition, 2003. This will be supplemented by a carefully crafted Course Reader, as well as additional readings, which will be distributed in class.           

 

Evaluation

Term Paper 35%

Final Exam 40%

Participation in Discussion and Attendance 25%

 

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